Since 2013 I’m writing about sustainability and Cannes Lions 🦁, and I’m getting happier and happier 🤗 when I see more environmental and social initiatives promoted through campaigns. Because it means that things are being done! Unless the advertising world just wants to appear to care… Let’s continue to believe in unicorns 🦄 and believe that the world is actually changing. For this year, here are my Top 7 Cannes Lions Grand Prix selection! Why 7? Because July (7) has come… along with Game of Thrones’ 7th season!

The true cost of your consumption
The Aland Index is a kind of ‘behind the scenes’ of your consumption. It calculates the environmental impact (carbon footprint) of each credit card transaction. Every month, a digital report 📊 is presented along with the monthly bill and suggests local, global or lifestyle call to actions to compensate for the impact caused. Combined with an index that would measure social impact (The True Cost), people consumption might change…? While change is in progress, communication of such initiative has been quite effective since the campaign made by RBK Communication Stockholm for the Bank of Aland 🇫🇮 was one of the winners of the Grand Prix Cyber.

4 for Fearless girl
Fearless Girl not only obtained the 3rd Grand Prix Glass, it has also been awarded with Grand Prix Titanium, PR and Outdoor! Sculpted by Kristen Visbal and commissioned by State Street Global Advisors (SSGA) via McCann New York, Fearless Girl depicts a Latina girl looking at the famous Charging Bull 🐃 at Bowling Green in the Financial District of Manhattan, New York City 🗽. Installed a day before the International Women’s Day, McCann New York found the perfect setup to advertise SSGA Gender Diversity Index, which, itself, promotes gender diversity across senior leadership within U.S. large-capitalization companies. More and more companies are launching women leaders program. We shall see in the future if such initiatives make known the power of women in leadership.

The unusual aspect
If I say “sport”, “Thailand”, you may think of Muay Thai. If I add “strong supporters”, you might guess… “Soccer ⚽?” In Thailand 🇹🇭, people are quite passionate about it: they like to watch it and play at it. In Khlong Toei community, a highly populated area in Bangkok, building relationships with one another, especially within the young ones, is one of many of their challenges. Sport is always a good way to connect people together. AP THAILAND, a real estate 🏘developer , in collaboration with CJ WORX, a digital agency firm in Thailand came up with the idea of redesigning soccer field through space optimization, and thus illustrating perfectly AP Thailand’s motto: “Space can change one’s life.” For this initiative, The Unusual Football Field Project obtained the Grand Prix Design.

Orange is the new nation
Remember the Refugee Olympic Team at the last Summer Olympics? Although they have not been awarded any medals 🏅, the campaign The Refugee Nation made by the agency Ogilvy NY for Amnesty International was awarded the Grand Prix for Good.

Superhumans
Staying in the Olympics theme, the campaign We are the Superhumans, for Channel 4 by Blink Productions & 4Creative got the Grand Prix Film. The main purpose of the campaign was to change people’s perception and attitude towards disabled people since “67% of British people feel uncomfortable talking to a disabled person”. With a cast of more than 140 people, including both non-athletes and Paralympic stars 🏊, the campaign was a real success “76% of Brits felt the campaign opened their eyes to what disabled people are capable of.”

The power of installation
The Grand Prix Creative Effectiveness was awarded to the campaign Van Gogh’s bedroom for Airbnb created by the agency Leo Burnett Chicago. When I watched the campaign video it reminds me of IKEA and the Red Cross’ temporary showroom of a Syrian house. The 25m² installation aimed to raise awareness about how people live, survive, and how to help.

When pay phones are upcycled into banks
In 2014, GSMA’s real-time tracker put the number of mobile devices 📱at 7.22 billion (!!) in the world. On Earth 🌍 we are now 7.5 billion people. Mobile phone has definitely become a “basic” accessory. Have you ever wondered how we did in the past, back to the old days? If you were outside and needed to have a call, you had to use payphones 📞. Obviously, there is less usage of such devices nowadays. In Colombia 🇨🇴, Tigo-Une, a Telecom firm came up with the idea of turning 13,000 payphones into micro savings systems. An unexpected upcycling idea! People can activate an account at a Une store, then deposit their earnings, which are mostly coins, into the public phone and their own microsavings account. The campaign PAYPHONE BANK made by Grey Colombia got the Grand Prix Product Design.

I hope you enjoyed the reading 😉 and it helped you to wait until GoT’s new season, especially if like me, you gave up on waiting for the 6th book of A Song of Ice and Fire 😔.